Chapter One
In my line of work it’s not good to hear a knock on
your door at eleven o’clock at night. It sends all kinds of images scampering
through your imagination and plucking your nerve ends.
But the knuckle-rap
was tentative, faintly rhythmic, and suggested an approach by someone who didn’t
want to punch my lights out or stick a gun in my stomach.
Both of which I’d
experienced at one time or another.
Perhaps, I thought,
it was someone selling water purifiers or de-icer sprays and trying a novel
sales approach.
Given what was to
happen later, perhaps I should have wished harder for either of these options
to be true.
Whoever it was
knocked again, this time a little louder. I walked from my lounge to the front
door and stood a moment. A real private investigator would have had a spy-hole
and taken the opportunity to peer through it, or would have strapped on his
shoulder holster before drawing back three bolts on the door. I suppose it says
something about my professionalism that I did neither.
I turned the knob
and pulled the door open.
A slight man a
little older than me, perhaps fifty, stood shivering in a dark suit, the knot
of his woollen tie pulled away from his scrawny neck. He glanced up at me as
though I’d taken him by surprise, and I caught in that glance a
universe of suspicion, fear and resentment. He was reasonably good-looking,
with short fair hair greying at the temples and a small, pointed nose, and his
head was set forward on his shoulders, giving him an air of hunched
anticipation. His grey eyes looked past me into the house like a starving man
looking at a heaving table of food, both greedy and somewhat resentful at the
same time.
From Chapter Sixteen
Stone had walked into the middle of the tunnel as
though he had a purpose, and when he turned to face me I found out what the
purpose was. He gestured to the bald Welshman, and to another man who’d been standing inside the entrance, and they grabbed
my arms and held tight. I didn’t bother struggling.
‘Go easy,
big fella,’ the Welshman said. ‘This won’t last long.’
I’d
been watching Stone’s face and it was as if the muscles in his cheeks and
forehead had worked themselves up into permanent outrage. He looked as if he
might explode. The energy came out of his hands as he worked them open and
closed.
‘You
talked to my wife,’ he said. ‘I told you I didn’t know anything about this Hastings
man so you go running to my wife and start
bothering her and my child.’
I said, ‘We
were in a public place. Isn’t she allowed to talk to anyone?’
‘She is.
You’re not.’ He nodded at the Welshman. ‘Hold him.’
He approached me and I knew what was coming and I
watched his weight shifting to see whether he was going for the head or the
body. Unfortunately, it was the body, so I could do nothing but try to tense my
stomach as his fist drove into it. He had a heavy punch that came from his wide
shoulders.
The air whooshed out of me and the Welshman and his
friend held me as I doubled over.
‘Easy, big
fella. Breathe deep.’
I did as he suggested, largely because I had no
choice.
Ideas and How to Get Them
This was a real headline in the UK’s
Guardian newspaper recently:
Russia’s ‘Sausage King’ killed in
Moscow in crossbow attack.
I posted it on Facebook, suggesting that it
wasn’t a headline you saw every day, and a writer friend commented that there
were at least 5 crime novel plots encapsulated in that sentence.
And he wasn’t wrong!
-
Who was the ‘Sausage King’ and
why was he under threat of assassination?
-
Why did the assassin use a
crossbow?
-
Why did it take place in
Moscow?
-
Who hired the assassin, and
why?
-
Did the King know who did it,
and would investigators be able to track down the murderer?
So when people ask – as they often do,
despite it being somewhat of a cliché – ‘Where do your ideas come from?’, I
only have to point them to the news. At least half a dozen of my books took
their inspiration from a stray headline or story I happened to see in a
newspaper. Here are just two examples:
-
there was the story of the
mother and daughter pair who were fooled by a Scottish con-woman into paying
thousands of pounds for a fake health treatment … in despair, the mother and
daughter later committed suicide. (I used the con-woman but softened the
ending!)
-
there was a trial in Liverpool
of two brothers who ran a building firm – officially – but were notorious local
gangsters on the side. (I later saw a pair of brothers, massive in black
tee-shirts, who became the physical models for my Ginger Twins.)
And in my latest book, The Two Fathers,
the beginning of the story was a report that a £50m burglary at a house
belonging to Tamara Ecclestone – daughter of former F1 boss Bernie – was
carried out by a mother and son team, possibly with some inside help.
In my books I’ve grown more and more
interested in family relationships in the world of crime, so a news item like
this immediately sparks interest: how did this couple become involved in crime?
Which one of them was the boss? Was one of them reluctant to get involved but was
persuaded by the other … ? All of these were excellent areas to explore.
I developed the story as part of my Sam Dyke
Investigations series, where Sam is a private investigator in the UK, so he
was, as usual, the central character. But as the story moved on I began to make
the couple more sympathetic than reports of the original crime suggested, and
created a Mr Big as the real villain of the piece. And even he solicits some
understanding at the end—it’s never good to have your villain be 100% evil!
And this is what usually happens. A
character or a situation or a set of facts piques your interest and you can’t
stop thinking about it. For me, primarily writing a private eye series, I then
have to work on how to fold the headline into a case he can investigate. This
is both the hard part and the fun part, and it’s where the fiction begins to
diverge from the fact. Inventing the story background, the characters and the
plotline that holds them all together is a really creative act and is sometimes
more fun than writing it all down afterwards!
But being creative with the facts as they
exist is an essential part of the process. Otherwise, I’d just be re-posting
the news, and where’s the fun in that?
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